Bomb Trial Focuses on Origin of Video

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: February 2, 1994

A defense lawyer in the World Trade Center bombing trial yesterday showed that a movie depicting a terror bomb attack on an American Embassy, which was played for the jury by the prosecution yesterday, included footage from a Hollywood release called "Death Before Dishonor," about American commandos fighting Muslim terrorists in a fictitious Middle Eastern country.

The footage, when shown on Monday, seemed a kind of visual highlight of the four-month trial. When presented to the jury, the prosecutor asked his witness, an Arab-English translator, to translate the title, "International Islamic Resistance Presents a Course in Manufacturing Explosives."

The video, found in the possession of one of the defendants, included laboratory scenes of a man showing how to mix chemicals to make bombs. These did not come from the American movie but they were intercut with scenes of gigantic explosions that did including a suicide car bombing of a large building flying an American flag.

In an argument held in the judge's chambers before the start of yesterday's session, a defense lawyer, Austin Campriello, virtually accused the prosecution of deceitfulness in showing the film, with its provocative images of an attack on the United States.

"The jury has really turned off on us as a result of this movie, not as a result of the bomb-making lesson, but as a result of the American embassy being blown up, which, in reality, is Hollywood," Mr. Campriello said.

But the lead prosecutor in the case, J. Gilmore Childers, contended, again without the jury present, that it did not matter where the footage came from. The important thing, Mr. Childers argued, is that it was used to encourage anti-American sentiments and violence against the United States.

The video is "clearly anti-American," Mr. Childers told Judge Kevin T. Duffy, who is presiding over the case, "and these explosions the government strongly believes were to incite the viewers of that tape to listen to the rest of the course so they can make explosives."

Defense lawyers told reporters that at least one of the defendants, Nidal A. Ayyad, had recognized the footage shown on Monday as including parts of an American movie well-known in the Arab-American community, in part because of some of them see as objectionable its portrayal of Arabs as terrorists. Mr. Ayyad's father, who is a regular attendant at the trial, said that he had seen the movie on television just two weeks ago and called it to the attention of his son's lawyer.

In any case, all four of the defense teams had rented videotapes of "Death Before Dishonor" before they went to court yesterday. Mr. Campriello, beginning his cross-examination, held aloft his copy of the videotape cover for all to see and then played on the television monitors scattered throughout the courtroom the same clips from "Death Before Dishonor" that had been intercut into the Arab-language bomb-making video shown to the jury on Monday.

One of them showed an orange fireball sweeping across a bridge. Another is the attack on the American embassy in a fictitious Arab country called Jemal. The third is a commando assault on what appears to be a walled fortress.

With each snippet of the American movie, Mr. Campriello got the witness on the stand, Salim Daniel, the translator, to note that the footage seemed identical to that shown by the prosecution on Monday, except, as Mr. Campriello pointed out, the color of the American original was better than it was in the film the jury viewed the day before.

Because the jurors saw only the very brief clips from "Death Before Dishonor," there was nothing that would enable them to know the full story of the movie, which, filmed in Israel with Israeli and American actors, essentially shows a group of Arab terrorists blowing up an American embassy in much the same way that the United States Marine barracks in Lebanon were blown up in 1983. It then depicts a revenge attack by American commandos.

Lawyers in the case will also have to wait until their closing arguments before presenting their differing interpretations of the film to the jury, though the argument in chambers yesterday morning probably provided a good clue to the positions of the two sides: In essence, the defense will argue that a Hollywood version of a terrorist assault should not be used to incriminate the defendants. The prosecution will in all likelihood say that, wherever the images came from, the videotape shows how to make bombs and was found in the possession of a defendant on trial in a case about a bombing.

After Mr. Campriello's cross-examination, Mr. Childers used his opportunity for redirect examination to play again portions of the bomb-making video that the Government had shown the jury on Monday.

Mr. Childers called attention to the fact that while the visual images in the movie and the video are identical, the soundtrack is entirely different. And, indeed, a hush seemed to fall over the courtroom as Mr. Childers replayed the bomb-making video and the jury listened to an Arabic recitation that replaced the movie music of the Hollywood film.

Mr. Childers then asked Mr. Daniel to translate some of the Arabic passages spoken in the video, a portion of which read:

"There is no other alternative except to wage a holy war and to make a push against the enemies of God.

"In God's name, hurrah the battle against our enemies, the Jews, the Christians, the Americans, and the Arab rulers and their advisers who legitimize and sanction the rule of these oppressors."